


moral injury

by discopolice



Category: Wakfu
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Medical Inaccuracies, unnamed character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 21:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15470742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/discopolice/pseuds/discopolice
Summary: "Physicians, like combat soldiers, often face a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury."





	moral injury

There is barely a pulse left in this young man when Qilby opens him up at the front, like gutting a fish. Three of his ribs are already cracked with the effort of keeping his frail heart beating, and Qilby's arms ache from pressing his weight into the chest wall of a lost cause. His scalpel is close at hand, and he draws a steady line down a heaving, pale chest.

He ratchets the sternal retractor open, even as the young man is nearly gone. From the start, when Qilby had seen him fall to his knees at the spring festival, he knew this man wouldn't survive the ordeal; call it deja vu, or the man looking just like a patient he had in another time, on another planet. Everyone in Vili knows each other somehow, and this man had a frail heart to begin with. He's been at the brink of death so many times that Glip once said, in the throes of a particularly bitter argument, "maybe he's just not meant to be here."

Really, every patient blends into each other, a flipbook of mortal faces and names written on paper and tucked into a file. He still tries, simply because it is what he does.

He really does make the effort to save the man on the table, split open and vulnerable in front of him - but it's not enough. Wakfu fills the room, seeping from his head and his fingers and the gaping opening in his chest. The wings on the man's head flash bright for just a moment, then fade away. There is no use in trying to save a body that has already left; he can only close the sternum with deliberate, heavy stitches and cover the body with a ceremonial cloth. "To aid the Wakfu in returning to the Goddess," it is said - what a damned joke.

There will only be more death when the Mechasms catch up with them. This new planet teems with promise, but he knows he'll have to call them down again soon enough. Their society functions like its own body: treating one failing organ does little for a failing system itself. It needs to move to exist. Like this young man's heart, stinking with stagnant blood, it no longer does.

His mother wails aloud and clutches the abandoned hat to her chest when Qilby imparts the necessary news. Qilby's eyes wrinkle at their corners, his shoulders turn down, but it is little but a physiological reaction to seeing a body die; he does not mourn. The mother, too young herself to see her child die, asks when the body will be released to the family. They want to return it to the earth, to the Goddess, with whom he surely is now - or so Qilby tells them, even though he doesn't believe it himself. This is part of being a healer, too, is compartmentalizing the part of you that has control over life and death from the part that is too tired to care.

If he dwelled on every death he saw, even with the eons of time he has, he'd have no time for himself. Instead, he lies on his back by the riverbank and draws his attention to the involuntary and unending movement of his lungs - rise, fall - rise, fall - rise -- fall.


End file.
